Well, it’s a chilly Sunday night here in bummer central, USA and I’m tired and relatively uninspired. It’s certainly coming through in my poetry assignment for creative writing class, which so far consists of the following:

I hate poetry and I am thirsty
I wonder if the next Gossip Girl is going
to be as good as the first one and
Oh my goodness I need to get my eyebrows
waxed and get started on my Wines reading,
I wish I could hire someone to clean my room.
Omg, is that me I am smelling?
No, my roommate is cooking something
with onions, thank God.

That’s right. Move over, Donald Hall.

Anyway, speaking of food, the binge eating experience of the century happened tonight in Taverna Banfi. I mentioned last week that my group in Restaurant Management Class has been charged with revamping the Banfi dessert menu (which is to be created and implemented in the next 4 weeks– good one), and, naturally, the first order of business was for the 8 of us to sit down and order three of everything on the dessert menu while the Hotel School picked up the tab.

Holy lord, I was eating chocolate like I’d just been dumped by a whole village of boyfriends. For real, any girl that gets her heart broken, let me tell you honey: march yourself into Taverna Banfi and tell them you’re working on a class project and just order everything on the dessert menu and stuff your little teary-eyed face. Nobody will judge you and the kitchen will probably do an extra-awesome job on all the desserts because they’ll think you’re critiquing the staff.

Not surprisingly, out of the eight group members, I am the least skilled in the kitchen. We haven’t spent much time cooking together yet, but I can tell you right now that the fact that I had to ask “wait, what’s that?” every time a less-than-everyday term was thrown around when we were discussing new dessert ideas… not a good sign.

I was really set on making cupcakes (what? Who doesn’t like cupcakes?), but the group nixed the idea and sort of looked at me like I was the dumbest girl ever. Right now, we’re focusing more on the season (the menu will be in place for the fall semester and until the next group turns it over in mid-Spring), so pear, pumpkin, apple are the flavor front-runners. We threw around some ideas tonight and all I can tell you is that it’s going to turn out to be an amazing menu. Amazing. Promise.

And some pictures from this evening’s Fat Kid Fest, complete with an annotated guide to the current dessert menu items that we porked out on tonight. (Click for larger versions)

The time has come to tackle HA 305: Restaurant Management.

The class involves two lectures per week and a Thursday lab from 2:55-10:00ish in Taverna Banfi. The first three weeks of lab have been a basic training of sorts: TIPS Alcohol Certification, an intro to how things are run at the Taverna in the front and back of the house, and some sampling of the surprisingly extensive TB wine list at the end of the evenings so we can leave the whole 7-8 hour thing with a smile. The next few weeks will be actual practicals (legitimate shifts in the restaurant), half in the front of house and half in the kitchen. Let’s pause for a moment and address this: I’m serving and preparing food for real people? God help them.

So last week was the back-of-house training lab. The TB Chef d’Cuisine, Anthony, set up a little “pretend” restaurant in Statler’s Terrace function space and then straight up started Top Cheffing the crap out of us. He asked us to change into kitchen whites, go up to the Taverna Banfi kitchen, grab a bunch of ingredients and make a menu out of it. Right.

Naturally, half of my classmates began spouting off ideas for, like, curried shrimp over grilled pineapple with jasmine rice, pan seared scallops with a raspberry demi-glace… the words, “oh, it’s my signature dish” were even uttered.

And me? I just sat there. I always wondered how the dudes on Top Chef could throw together a fabulous dish without recipes or catastrophic failures… turns out, not so uncommon. At one point during the intro to this whole mission, Chef Anthony even made eye contact with me and was like, “hey, you look terrified. Are you ok?”

Not surprisingly, I was put in charge of beverages. Some Sprite, grenadine, a little white grapefruit juice and a splash of OJ and I was in business. Around dinnertime, we were notified that some students were ready to eat in our little simulated restaurant, so we got ourselves into gear in the kitchen and made 30-ish portions of whatever dish or course we were in charge of. We practiced taking tickets and putting orders up– we even attempted the screamy kitchen lingo (which I’m actually quite fabulous at, thank you, because it’s essentially a bunch of purposeful yelling).

Normally I’d recount an embarrassing story here, but Chef Anthony was actually pretty cool to me through the whole kitchen training episode and prevented any earthshattering disasters from swallowing the Statler. To be fair, he probably just kept coming over to my station to make sure I wasn’t drowning myself in grenadine, but he was certainly helpful in explaining what was going on around me and ganked me from the bev station for a little while. I got a chance to swing by the grill, appetizer, entree and dessert areas so I could sorta learn the ropes and– dare I even say this– I had an awesome time and somehow managed to light nothing and nobody on fire.

But it’s not over yet. Up next, I have my shifts in Taverna Banfi: an assistant waiter shift, a backwaiter shift, a pantry-prep shift and– get ready– a GRILL STATION SHIFT. No, I know, I’m scared for you people. However, I’m told that the expediters won’t allow a product to leave the kitchen if it’s not up to TB standards, so at least we can all take comfort in knowing I’m not poisoning you.

And perhaps the most exciting part of HA305? The semester-long project that kicked off today. There’s an assortment of different Banfi-related team projects assigned to the class; everything ranging from revenue management to advertising campaigns to implementation of a mystery shopper program. My group project? Get ready…

Completely redesigning and implementing an new Taverna Banfi Dessert Menu with all new items.

I know.

On Thursday night, a friend of mine turned 21. Natch, we took her out to the bars in Collegetown to celebrate.

We were at a particular establishment that I try to stay away from because of the overpowering stench of vomit and Axe body spray, the too-loud music and the fact that the dance floor is usually more like a pool of nasty spilled beverages. In the span of 45 minutes, not only did I see my ex-boyfriend, half of the Sun staff, and a bunch of sorority sisters, but I also managed to totally awk it up with some grad student.

The basic jist of the story goes like this: some guy I’d never seen before was wearing a suit and I asked him why. It was a legitimate question. Why would he wear a suit to the bars– to this bar? His house was probably no less than a 5-minute walk from there. Could he not have gone home and changed?

He started talking really fast and I didn’t hear what he was saying, nor do I ever think he provided any answers to solve the suit mystery. I did catch that he was a business school grad student, went to undergrad somewhere in the Midwest, and he was 28.

28? Wow. But eh, he seemed interested and my friends had left me, so I kept talking to him and prayed he wouldn’t ask me anything that would give away my age. Obviously, he did ask– and I tried to lie and say I was a 27-year-old law student. It really didn’t fly and he looked totally pissed, said a bunch of stuff about how it’s uncool to lie about these things and blah blah.

The next morning, I walked into Casino Operations class at 10:10 am clutching my life-saving bottle of Gatorade…and guess who waltzes in and sits down right in front of me with his grad student friends? Oh yes. The suit man himself.

Almost 20,000 undergrads and grads on this campus and sometimes it feels way, way too small.

I finally got around to taking some pictures of the fully-decorated apartment. My three best girlfriends from freshman year live with me in a four-bedroom apartment in Collegetown. Most C-town apartments are more like the crap I lived in last year (read: should be condemned yet cost $650 per person anyway), but we managed to find this adorable industrial-chic apartment– and let’s use that term loosely because I only say “industrial” due to the presence of a ladder. Unfortunately, I couldn’t paint the walls vom-juice (Pepto) pink this time around because our new landlord wasn’t down for it.

So behold the ‘penthouse’ in all its glory– click any picture to see a bigger version. If it matters to you, the ladder in the picture goes up to a loft that any unwanted male houseguests are exiled to when we decide we don’t like them anymore (hey, girls change their minds sometimes)…and also for storage.

Remember how I kind of decided in the middle of last year that I maybe sorta wanted to go to grad school for journalism? Did anyone care besides my dad who thought he was done paying exorbitant amounts of money for me to fail finance classes? Did everyone think I had a ridiculous burst of motivation and the whole thing was only going to last a week, kind of like the time I decided to be a vegetarian or like those 5 days I was a redhead?
Well, I am one step closer to actually going through with this: I have conquered the GRE’s. Well, I conquered them on the second attempt, anyway. The first attempt was not such a great success and the fact that it took me 30 minutes to write a paragraph in cursive before the test began was probably not the best of omens. Why do they have us write paragraphs in cursive? Anyone know? To verify that I’m not a robot? America (yes, the whole thing) made my mom write a paragraph in cursive when she received her American citizenship. I suppose ETS believes the GRE is akin to obtaining your American citizenship on the scale of important milestones in one’s life.
Anyway, the first time I took the GRE’s (this summer in Manhattan) I totally tanked on the math. It was more of a state-of-mind sort of thing, but to be honest, I hadn’t encountered the word ‘Pythagorean’ for at least four years prior to my taking on this whole GRE mess… so clearly, I had to do a little more studying. I came back to school with little optimism about the whole grad school scene. But right before classes started, I ventured into the bowels of Syracuse to take the GRE again and it seems that this time, I have showed the GRE what’s up. Yes yes, brothers and sisters around the country, feel free to put your Diet Cokes down and applaud.

Next mission: earn a GPA that is somewhat presentable– I’m not looking for Major League MVP status here, but at least something like a “Most Improved Player” award.